Persona 5

At E3 2016, I went hands-off with some of the new Persona 5 footage and saw some of the different mechanics and features . Here are my biggest takeaways.

• There's a day-night cycle, and the protagonist will travel to popular Japanese areas like Shibuya between class and other activities.  
• Several part-time jobs are available, from flower shops to convenience stores, that should help make some extra money and work on skills.
• An "expulsion timer" is something that the player is actively working against, often located in the top right hand corner of the screen. If you let it run down, bad things will happen.
• You can do other cool stuff around town like go to the movies (and probably bring your love interests along) besides work at your part time job or outfit your dingy apartment with cool new furniture and decorations.
• You can get the jump on enemies on the "overworld" map in order to get the chance to strike first in the turn-based combat rounds
• When you have the enemies on the ropes, you have the option to either execute the traditional "all-out attack" and beat on them OR you can TALK to them. Yeah, you can have a nice chat with the baddies. If your chat proves successful, it appears that your character absorbs the enemy Persona. This is probably the primary method of Persona acquisition in the game.
• A strange meter appears in the upper left corner while the player roams dungeons. Atlus wouldn't tell me what it does or means, but the meter did deplete (from 5% to 0%) after the player killed an enemy. So it may have something to do with a big enemy finding you or getting your crew caught.
• You can activate a special kind of sight if you get lost in the dungeons, it will highlight interactable objects like buttons, levers, or help display a trail/path to the next area you should be investigating.
• Combat is super stylized from start to finish, with cool screens popping up and showing you how much money and experience you earn - it's varied and really awesome to look at, and should keep things interesting even if you're grinding for goodies.
• In combat, you can have one of your characters "throw the baton" to another character. Essentially, this means that you will pass one character's turn to give another character that turn. So if you have a character with ice magic and know the enemy is weak to it, you can throw the baton and get two turns of powerful attacks on your vulnerable target, instead of acting with a character that may not have a good attack to use.

Persona 5 launches on February 14. What do you think of the game so far?